“As an American university student, 2020 has been a year of unprecedented weirdness. It’s brought upon a good deal of comfort and stark realizations for me. To sum it all up, life in quarantine hasn’t been bad at all. It’s certainly been a transformative time and, as a young adult, it’s come to represent the transition to adulthood for me.”
“As someone who has been home bound/self quarantined for a few years to due to chronic illnesses and disabilities, the pandemic hasn’t changed my life that drastically. In terms of daily life and mental health I’ve been struggling a bit however, there is no routine set in place for me, all the days seem to fade into each other, and I’ve been too scared to go outside because of my physical health.”
“I was incredibly bored throughout the entire experience and it was hard finding things to do in my own home but I’ve managed find many things like drawing, watching movies, learning a new language, etc. I try to talk to my friends through different methods everyday and the rare occasion we see each other face-to-face we still adhere to rules as best we can.”
“I woke up late for school as usual and saw my phone filled with notifications about some virus. The breaking news said that there are thousands of people who are dead because of this virus. I read the news, it said that the virus is called COVID-19 or Coronavirus.”
“I think that the hardest thing about quarantine and COVID-19 has been going to school online…This semester, I feel like some of my teachers seem to be expecting more than if we were actually in person. I am finding it more difficult to balance my life between social, personal, and school.”
“Going to work was very scary because I have some health issues as it is and I have to interact with people, so I constantly used sanitizer, gloves, multiple masks, etc…Working in a medical field in this time has been exhausting and will be even harder as flu season approaches…I hope one day I will be able to give the COVID-19 vaccine as part of my job and help to others.”
“She moved back to San Francisco because she missed the fog and the cable cars and the other poets. In the 1970s she found it easier (and less expensive) to write rather than paint.”
“The biggest challenge that I am now facing is the toil of children around the country not going to school. I believe that kids need to be going to school. The situation has been messing with my thoughts. I have heard terrible stories about the impact of a virtual school on students and their mental health. At the beginning of quarantine in March and April, the fear of the unknown was another hardship. The fear was paralyzing and I found myself crying a lot.”
“Being the walker in the city that I am I took a shorter-long walk this afternoon. The weather was crisp, a classic early spring sort of day…I noticed while walking many people were following the six foot rule, as they swerved away from me like I was a leper.”
“Summer didn’t feel like summer because nothing really changed except for the fact that I wasn’t doing schoolwork all day, but it wasn’t the break I needed. It was not the stress-free summer I usually have – how could it be, I was starting to apply to college and things quickly turned downhill for my family.”
Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic is an initiative sponsored by the Poetic Media Lab and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University.
Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA),
Stanford University
Address:
4th floor, Wallenberg Hall (bldg. 160)
450 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Stanford Mail Code: 2055